IX.
When we compare poet and painter in particular instances, we should be careful to inquire whether both have had entire freedom, and been allowed to labor for the highest results of their art without the exercise of any constraint from without.
Religion often exercised such constraint upon the old artists. A work, devotional in character, must often be less perfect than one intended solely to produce pleasure. Superstition loaded the gods with symbols which were not always reverenced in proportion to their beauty.
In the temple of Bacchus at Lemnos, from which the pious Hypsipyle rescued her father under the guise of the deity,[[65]] the god was represented horned. So he doubtless appeared in all his temples, the horns being symbols typical of his nature and functions. The unfettered artist, whose Bacchus was not designed for a temple, omitted the symbol. If, among the statues of the god that remain to us, we find none with horns,[[66]] that circumstance perhaps proves that none of them were sacred statues, representing the god in the shape under which he was worshipped. We should naturally expect, too, that against such the fury of the pious iconoclasts in the first centuries of Christianity would have been especially directed. Only here and there a work of art was spared, because it had never been desecrated by being made an object of worship.
But since, among the antiques that have been unburied, there are specimens of both kinds, we should discriminate and call only those works of art which are the handiwork of the artist, purely as artist, those where he has been able to make beauty his first and last object. All the rest, all that show an evident religious tendency, are unworthy to be called works of art. In them Art was not working for her own sake, but was simply the tool of Religion, having symbolic representations forced upon her with more regard to their significance than their beauty. By this I do not mean to deny that religion often sacrificed meaning to beauty, or so far ceased to emphasize it, out of regard for art and the finer taste of the age, that beauty seemed to have been the sole end in view.
If we make no such distinction, there will be perpetual strife between connoisseurs and antiquarians from their failure to understand each other. When the connoisseur maintains, according to his conception of the end and aim of art, that certain things never could have been made by one of the old artists, meaning never by one working as artist from his own impulse, the antiquarian will understand him to say that they could never have been fashioned by the artist, as workman, under the influence of religion or any other power outside the domain of art. He will therefore think to confute his antagonist by showing some figure which the connoisseur, without hesitation, but to the great vexation of the learned world, will condemn back to the rubbish from which it had been dug.[[67]]
But there is danger, on the other hand, of exaggerating the influence of religion on art. Spence furnishes a remarkable instance of this. He found in Ovid that Vesta was not worshipped in her temple under any human image, and he thence drew the conclusion that there had never been any statues of the goddess. What had passed for such must be statues, not of Vesta, but of a vestal virgin.[[68]] An extraordinary conclusion! Because the goddess was worshipped in one of her temples under the symbol of fire, did artists therefore lose all right to personify after their fashion a being to whom the poets give distinct personality, making her the daughter of Saturn and Ops, bringing her into danger of falling under the ill treatment of Priapus, and narrating yet other things in regard to her? For Spence commits the further error of applying to all the temples of Vesta and to her worship generally what Ovid says only of a certain temple at Rome.[[69]] She was not everywhere worshipped as in this temple at Rome. Until Numa erected this particular sanctuary, she was not so worshipped even in Italy. Numa allowed no deity to be represented in the shape of man or beast. In this prohibition of all personal representations of Vesta consisted, doubtless, the reformation which he introduced into her rites. Ovid himself tells us that, before the time of Numa, there were statues of Vesta in her temple, which, when her priestess Sylvia became a mother, covered their eyes with their virgin hands.[[70]] Yet further proof that in the temples of the goddess outside the city, in the Roman provinces, her worship was not conducted in the manner prescribed by Numa, is furnished by various old inscriptions, where mention is made of a priest of Vesta (Pontificis Vestæ).[[71]] At Corinth, again, was a temple of Vesta without statues, having only an altar whereon sacrifices were offered to the goddess.[[72]] But did the Greeks, therefore, have no statues of Vesta? There was one at Athens in the Prytaneum, next to the statue of Peace.[[73]] The people of Iasos boasted of having one in the open air, upon which snow and rain never fell.[[74]] Pliny mentions one in a sitting posture, from the chisel of Scopas, in the Servilian gardens at Rome, in his day.[[75]] Granting that it is difficult for us now to distinguish between a vestal virgin and the goddess herself, does that prove that the ancients were not able or did not care to make the distinction? Certain attributes point evidently more to one than the other. The sceptre, the torch, and the palladium would seem to belong exclusively to the goddess. The tympanum, attributed to her by Codinus, belongs to her, perhaps, only as the Earth. Or perhaps Codinus himself did not know exactly what it was he saw.[[76]]